A Study of Viral Pins (Part 2)

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Today we are continuing the research that started last week. First of all, we wanted to see if every pinner has the same "fighting chance" when it comes to creating pins that go viral. This study defines "viral pin" as any pin that accumulated 1,000 or more direct repins. We primarily wanted to find out whether more influential accounts (ones with a lot of followers) have a higher percentage of viral pins than less influential accounts. Our research confirmed that the influencers indeed have a significant advantage:

Pinners that have only a thousand followers or even 10,000 followers tend to have relatively few viral pins (averaging only 2-3 out of 10,000 pins). Pinners with a million followers have a much higher percentage of viral pins (averaging nearly 2 out of 100 pins). By the way, in case you wonder how many pinners have over a million followers - there are around 400 of them on Pinterest. We are going to cover this group of pinners in one of the upcoming BoardBooster Labs posts.

Now we're shifting gears to another interesting question - are highly viral pins more likely to be found on group boards or personal boards? Once again, we define a highly viral pin as any pin with 1,000 or more direct repins. Our research has proven that the majority of these pins reside on personal boards. As a matter of fact, you are 13 times more likely to find a highly viral pin on a personal board than on a group board.

Want to learn more about virality on Pinterest? Please contact us at Support@BoardBooster.com and recommend topics that we can explore in future Labs posts!